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Microprocessing
Social Media Spoilers Won’t Ruin ‘Avengers’ (or Any Other Movie)
They might actually help you like it more
In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today, to give you a better tomorrow.
This story contains spoilers for the most recent season of The Magicians.
The star of one of my favorite shows ever, The Magicians, unexpectedly dies in the season four finale. Among the handful of fans on my Twitter feed, people were either sharing very obvious spoilers or bemoaning them.
And you know what? Honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. Quentin is dead, and that’s sad, but knowing that going into the show didn’t affect how much I enjoyed the finale. In fact, it may have made me appreciate it more. Research shows that spoilers don’t have the negative impact many of us assume they do.
Yet absolute terror of spoilers abounds across the internet. On Twitter, people treat spoiler warnings like alerts that you’re about to drive into a radioactive fallout zone. Entertainment websites plaster spoiler warnings on articles, rightfully terrified of the hordes who rage against anything they recognize as the vaguest plot detail. And spoiler sections of podcasts abound: On Vanity Fair’s excellent podcast devoted to the HBO show Sharp Objects, producers included a nearly 30-second long recording of pig sounds to denote that the hosts would be discussing the Gillian Flynn book that inspired the show.
But the fury over spoilers has never been more relevant than it is now, with the opening of Avengers: Endgame and the last season of Game of Thrones.
The study found that readers actually significantly preferred spoiled stories over those that were not spoiled.
Last week, when someone leaked a five-minute clip of Endgame, fans were “miserable,” according to the Verge. “For all those people who posted and shared that video I assure you that you have special place in Hell [sic],” one Facebook commenter wrote. The film’s directors, brothers Joe…
